Hillary Clinton answers questions from reporters on March 10 at the United Nations in New York. Clinton admitted she made a mistake in choosing for convenience not to use an official e-mail account when she was secretary of state. (AFP/Getty Images file photo)

Hillary Clinton has cynically and clumsily awakened America to the importance of retaining government e-mails as public documents. But the federal government is hardly the only place where electronic records of official business should be preserved.

It should occur in Colorado, too, and yet usually doesn’t.

Oh, sure, the Colorado Open Records Act explicitly lists electronic mail among public documents. And it mandates governments to “adopt a policy regarding the retention, archiving, and destruction of such records.”

But what if the policy adopted basically results or even encourages the short-term, permanent purging of government e-mails?

Unfortunately, that is the current state of affairs under the Hickenlooper administration.

Todd Shepherd of CompleteColorado.com may have been the first to notice. He broke a story early last year documenting, through e-mails, that U.S. Sen. Mark Udall’s office had been upset with the Colorado Division of Insurance over how it characterized health care cancellation notices. When Shepherd sought additional e-mails generated by state officials, he was told they no longer existed and couldn’t be recovered.

E-mails from late 2013 couldn’t be recovered? In this era of cheap and essentially limitless storage, why aren’t e-mails retained for years, if not for good?

Shepherd recently teamed up with the Colorado Freedom of Information Coalition (CFOIC), a group dedicated to “protecting the public’s right to know,” to query state agencies regarding their policy toward e-mail retention. The findings are disturbing.

As Shepherd wrote in his analysis, “Under the new system [since 2012], the primary application that allows for long-term (i.e., longer than 30 days) retention of e-mails is Google Vault. As the state converted to Google mail, only one agency — the Department of Corrections (DOC) — opted to purchase the fully featured version of Google Vault. Furthermore, it appears that DOC did so not for e-mail retention purposes, but for a feature that automatically purges e-mails after 90 days, regardless of circumstances.”

In essence, most state workers are, by default, on the equivalent of a 30-day e-mail retention policy once an e-mail has been sent to the trash bin.

Even worse, it appears there is no policy against “double deleting,” meaning deleting an e-mail from the trash bin before 30 days. That will purge the e-mail immediately and permanently.

If someone double-deleted every day, there would effectively be no preservation of e-mails at all.

“With no uniform state policy on mandatory retention, an employee could immediately wipe out an electronic ‘paper trail’ — by deleting an e-mail from the trash bin — and that e-mail is not recoverable even by supervisors,” Shepherd observes.

Earlier this month, The New York Times reported that New York lawmakers were incensed to discover that Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s administration had instituted a policy of automatically deleting e-mails after 90 days. In Colorado, 90 days would be a luxury.

“Why shouldn’t this material be kept indefinitely?” wonders Jeffrey Roberts, CFOIC’s executive director. “It’s a massive trove of government records and there’s a lot that you can potentially learn from them.”

And not just journalists, but historians and other interested parties, too.

It’s a scandal that Colorado is so indifferent to the fate of such a large segment of documents that belong in the public domain.

E-mail Vincent Carroll at vcarroll@denverpost.com. Follow him on Twitter @vcarrollDP

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Since President Trump appointed me as the Bureau of Land Management's Deputy Director for Policy and Programs, where I “exercise the authority of the director,” my 43-year legal career and 30 years representing Westerners have been scrutinized. Public accountability is important in public service, as I am entrusted with upholding the values of this public institution in an ethical and...

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